Comment by AIPedant

9 months ago

On Twitter, Colin Fraser pointed out that Black Mirror was somewhat optimistic in that the horrible evil technology actually works as described[1].

Truly pessimistic science fiction would have

- people worshipping an AI God which is demonstrably dumber than a dog

- friendly humanoid robots which don't really understand how to walk down a flight of stairs

- gravitational warp drives which are purely cosmetic and cannot travel anywhere, though it leads to terrible cancer

- a Potemkin Dyson Sphere where only 5% of the panels work and the government blames out-of-system immigrants for the blackouts

[1] https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1911129344979964207#...

41 comments

AIPedant

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ben_w  9 months ago

You may be interested in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, an entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. The planet on which the dog was located then exploded, but not due to the battle fleet, instead it was because some people didn't want the planet to provide the right question to an answer they already had, but they didn't realise they didn't need to owing to the accidental interference of a dead species that had sent away all their telephone sanitisers before being wiped out in a pandemic caused by a dirty telephone.

bazoom42  9 months ago

The movie Brazil is a take on 1984 where the technology does not work very well. The thought police is not all-seeing but quite inept (although just as brutal). The plot is set off by an actual bug getting caught in a typing macine evetually causing the wrong guy to get arrested. The rebel hero is a rogue plumber who actually fixes things which are broken.

  • jeffwass  9 months ago

    One note - in the 1984 novel the technology (or at least the product quality) didn’t work very well either. Eg the “victory” cigarettes that fall apart, or terrible coffee with a daily allocated saccharin pill.

    • bazoom42  9 months ago

      Good point - only the tools of oppression really works in 1984, all consumer products are crap. It is suggested this is deliberate, but even that might be propaganda.

      And apparently it is a common workplace injury to get ones arm caught in a novel-writing machine.

gcanyon  9 months ago

There is a science fiction story, I don’t remember who wrote it or the title, where humanity discovers a way to modify the speed of light within a region. Excited, they work incredibly hard to implement the technology, only to discover they can only make it slower.

Maybe it was jumping to a parallel universe to travel and then jumping back. But the same issue: the limit was lower.

  • cpeterso  9 months ago

    ChatGPT suggests the story is "Local Effect" by D. L. Hughes, published in 1968.

    An alien named Firefoal of Swaylone observes that human physicists mistakenly believe in a constant light speed because humanity was unknowingly situated in a region of space where the speed of light had been artificially reduced. Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.

    • shawn_w  9 months ago

      Ah, the joys of trusting a LLM for story IDs...

      This one actually exists (a rarity in my experience), and the plot largely matches the description up to the last sentence (though the speed isn't exactly reduced; it's made a constant)

      >Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.

      That doesn't happen in the story. It ends with the aliens disabling the device (the drive of a derelict starship) generating the field that caused experiments to suggest the speed of light is constant, and then leaving, destroying "the whole basis of their physics, but that is just a fantasy anyways."

    • gcanyon  9 months ago

      Thanks! This wasn't it -- the story I read was a short short story, maybe only a page or two. It was basically:

         1. Humans despaired that the stars were impossibly far away, due to lightspeed limitations
   2. They realized it is possible to <do something> to get around that
   3. They worked hard to try it out
   4. Surprise! They made it worse/it was worse.
   5. The end

      I don't remember any characterization, or narrative, beyond the above.

  • IAmBroom  9 months ago

    Well, since light travels slower in non-vacuum space, like air or water or glass, I'd say we've already discovered that.

  • aaronbrethorst  9 months ago

    Something similar to this comes up in Death's End, the last book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.

    • gcanyon  9 months ago

      Thanks! I haven't read it, and this was maybe forty years ago, and it was a short short story, so it has to be something else.

Legend2440  9 months ago

Hilariously, a dyson sphere operating at 5% capacity would still generate more power every second than humanity currently generates in 10,000 years.

  • ben_w  9 months ago

    But at even just 4%, the thermal emissions from a partial Dyson swarm would still be enough to heat Earth by twice what anthropogenic climate change has managed so far: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092702482...

    • hoseja  9 months ago

      "anthropogenic climate change" isn't heating the planet by literally heating it up with joules from burning stuff but by shifting the balance between absorbed and radiated heat from the sun.

      2 replies →

    • Legend2440  9 months ago

      Interesting.

      Luckily with that kind of energy you can do absolutely insane things, like build planet-sized sunshades or push the earth to a more distant orbit. These challenges can be engineered around.

      1 reply →

  • Calwestjobs  9 months ago

    Sure, but 89 % of that 5% will be still used for interplanetary yacht fleet of owner of Chocó-Darién Inc.

    • philipkglass  9 months ago

      The remaining 11% of 5% would need about 8 seconds to generate more energy than humanity currently generates in 10,000 years.

      Luminosity of the sun: ~380 yottawatts (3.8 * 10^26 watts)

      Sunlight conversion efficiency of a silicon based solar panel: ~20%

      A Dyson swarm around the sun built with silicon solar panels: ~76 yottawatts

      A Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work: ~3.8 yottawatts

      The leftovers from a Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work and 89% of the output has been used for interplanetary yachts: ~418 zetawatts (4.18 * 10^23 watts)

      Primary power production on Earth: ~20 terawatts (2 * 10^13 watts)

      10000 years times 20 terawatts is 10000 * 365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 10^12 = 3.16 * 10^24 joules

      Since a joule is just a watt-second, it takes 7.6 seconds for that 418 zetawatts of leftover Dyson swarm output to match up to 10,000 years of current human energy consumption.

      6 replies →

  • AIPedant  9 months ago

    It would also cost more power to construct than humanity is currently capable of generating in 10,000 years, so I am not sure what your point is.

    Presumably a 5% functional Dyson sphere would be a corrupt boondoggle in the same way as a power plant which is down for maintenance 95% of the year, but the financial calculation would use much larger numerators and denominators than we are used to.

m463  9 months ago

I think optimistic scifi needs to lie a bit:

- allow you to exceed the speed of light, or better yet portal somewhere

- learn we are not alone in the universe

- store basically infinite energy in your hip-mounted blaster

- get the girl/guy in the end

  • aleph_minus_one  9 months ago

    > - learn we are not alone in the universe

    This is neither a message that is optimistic nor pessimistic. Isn't it much more likely that this species (despite having something that can be called "intelligence" in an appropriate sense) simply be so different that the difference is insanely much larger than between an human and an octopus?

    Example:

    Stanisław Lem; Solaris

    > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

    where the alien species is an intelligent ocean.

  • nathan_compton  9 months ago

    I think Greg Egan writes very optimistic science fiction that only really does 2 sort of. Exceeding the speed of light is, from my point of view, so absurd a premise as to make me feel that any hard science fiction which tries to get around it is not serious.

    Its not that I can't enjoy that kind of science fiction, its just I can't take it seriously as having anything to do with actually reckoning with our position in the universe as human beings. Universe Big.

    • m463  9 months ago

      Without exceeding the speed of light, "Universe Big"... and universe too far away to explore. :(

      I guess we could have a story set it the far far (far!) future...

      4 replies →

croes  9 months ago

Don’t forget this scenario:

The file with the life saving code, text, formula etc. can’t be read because the license server needed to get access doesn’t exist anymore